Vitalik launched the AI agent "Paranoid Mode" privacy solution: integrating zkAPI, Tor, and local LLM prompt rewriting

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform that he has integrated zkAPI, Tor, additional obfuscation traffic, and local LLM prompt rewriting into a daemon compatible with the OpenAI interface, and created a "paranoid mode" wrapper for his AI agent tool pi. The relevant code has been open-sourced on GitHub.

The main mechanism of this solution is as follows: each conversation uses a separate Tor line, with requests mixed in random obfuscation traffic; zkAPI is used to prevent identity leakage through payment links; all prompts are first rewritten by a local model, which the user can choose, with Vitalik himself using qwen3.8-flash-next. The outer layer of the proxy tool is wrapped in a bwrap sandbox, and then another layer of torsocks is added, ensuring that all network operations go through Tor.

Vitalik stated that this solution is already quite usable, but the latency has significantly increased, especially slow when starting a new conversation. He pointed out that Tor is far from the best privacy solution in this scenario: obfuscation traffic can prevent passive eavesdropping, but if the LLM service provider colludes with the Tor entry node and actively manipulates timing, the protective effect will be greatly weakened.